PlayStation Home getting a redesign to focus on social games

Ars talks to PlayStation Home director Jack Buser about an upcoming update to …

Ever since PlayStation Home launched, Sony has been toying with differentways to incorporate games into its virtual world, with various levels of success. Now the company has announced that the entire service will be completely redesigned to put the focus almost entirely on games. According to Home director Jack Buser, the redesign will represent the service's change "from a social network to a social game platform."

Home had slowly been increasing its focus on games prior to the announcement, and the service, which now boasts 23 million users worldwide, currently features more than 230 titles to play. But the new redesign will take these efforts a step further by making the service almost entirely about games. It will still look a lot like Home, but it's going to be set up like an amusement park.

"We are students of Walt Disney here," Buser told Ars, "and we’re going to be designing the core experience inside Home not unlike the way they’ve designed Disney Land and Disney World, where you have a central transportation hub surrounded by themed districts. Except out districts are going to be themed off of game genres."

The central plaza area that currently holds Home together will be replaced with a transportation center that can take users to a number of different locations. At launch there will be four themed spaces, representing action, sports, adventure, and casual games. Each area has been designed to look and feel like the genre its based on. The action area, for example, "feels like a level from an FPS, this really gritty urban feel" according to Buser.

Home has always had themed spaces, but the main difference here is that the entire world will be "filled with games." And not just the occasional casual mini-game here and there, but actual games aimed at the PS3 audience. For example, when the service relaunches, the indie puzzle game Cogs—currently available on both Steam and iOS—will be playable.

"So when you first enter into the hub the very first thing you’re going to see is just games," explained Buser.

A new, optional quest system is also being introduced into Home, which will turn the service itself into a sort of giant meta-game, letting users play games and complete other activities to earn various rewards. When you first enter into the new Home you'll be confronted by an activity board that lists all of the different quests you can take on. User-generated content will also become a big part of the experience, as Sony will be introducing a new event system.

"It won’t just be Sony and our partners throwing events on the platform but we’re going to give the keys of the castle to the community and actually build an event system such that they can post and promote their own events inside PlayStation Home," Buser told Ars.

In addition to the redesign, Home will also be getting a separate technology update aimed at streamlining the service and making things faster overall. That update currently doesn't have a release date, while the redesign will go live sometime this fall.

36 Reader Comments

When are they going to realize that people don't want to load up a graphical environment and steer around an avatar to go play games when they could just select the game from a list and probably be playing before Home finished loading.

Until we get closer to real VR, I don't see something like Home gaining traction, and maybe not even then. It has to either be way cooler than picking things from lists, or completely seamless and easy. It's stupid for them to be screwing around with this when they are still lagging behind Live and the 360 in a few critical areas.

I could see this as being compelling if it were a way to gain (free) access to certain PSN games. Of course they would have to solve the fact that those games need to be installed to the disk (and no one would want to enter Home and have to do that).

This. I am a trophy nut, and without them I have no more reason to use Home than I have to play WoW, Middle Earth Online, League of Legends, etc for free. I am still not sure what they are trying to make Home into and I'm not sure they know either.

I remember Penny Arcade had a podcast where they said an ad for it should be: "Home. A dumb place for stupid people." Makes me chuckle.

I've been saying for a while, Home is the beta run for the XMB's eventual replacement with Playstation 4 or 5. Personally, I don't spend any time in Home. Then again, I don't play Second Life, don't touch Facebook games, and don't really understand people who get together in games like Planet Entropia. All of those things are huge, but don't interest me. Home is the same way. There's a lot of people who use it, but I can't come up with any compelling reason why they would. Making the basic interface for your console completely enmeshed into something like Home won't horribly inconvenience those users who don't like Home, but will give Sony a major point where they can distinguish their console from the competition.

I'm trying to figure out what they mean by "social gaming" in this context. The most common application of it is those godawful facebook "games" where the social aspect is limited entirely to spamming your friends into clicking links, and the other 99% of the time you're playing what is effectively a single player game.

:facepalm: When are they going to realize that people don't want to load up a graphical environment and steer around an avatar to go play games when they could just select the game from a list and probably be playing before Home finished loading.

Until we get closer to real VR, I don't see something like Home gaining traction, and maybe not even then. It has to either be way cooler than picking things from lists, or completely seamless and easy. It's stupid for them to be screwing around with this when they are still lagging behind Live and the 360 in a few critical areas.

Home is the lamest thing ever. I was hoping Sony would drop it like a bad habit and use the resources on improving useful things. You know, like that piece of junk web browser. Cell phones have a better web browsing experience then the PS3.

How about instead of catering to the limited group who uses Home (out of the 230m, like everyone I know, most of them inadvertently queued the download and got stuck making a single avatar and never used it again). how about actually fixing the default interface, and overhaul the media sharing system (add iTunes support, MCE, AirPlay, SOMETHING other than the useless thing that is DLNA for people with large collections. I'de love to actually access all that meta data instead of truncated file names and giant alphabetically sorted lists with no search function, GEZE! Would it be so hard to replicate Netflix nice UI for video and music search, and actually use a supported protocol from a major manufacturer?

Home is quaint, but the damned best (self acclkaimed) multimedia console SUCKS at multimedia? All these years we can't fix a GUI and license a newer protocol?

:facepalm: When are they going to realize that people don't want to load up a graphical environment and steer around an avatar to go play games when they could just select the game from a list and probably be playing before Home finished loading.

Until we get closer to real VR, I don't see something like Home gaining traction, and maybe not even then. It has to either be way cooler than picking things from lists, or completely seamless and easy. It's stupid for them to be screwing around with this when they are still lagging behind Live and the 360 in a few critical areas.

Home is currently clunky and it seems silly to jump into a game in order to jump into a game with other players. It's good Sony is making it more of a free games hub world. I'm just not sure who their audience actually is. I especially don't understand all the virtual items and purchasing of those virtual items for you personal space.

Sure; 23 million accounts have been created. And how many of those return on a frequent basis? Maybe 10%? I go back to Home every now and then to check out the updates, but that's about it. Home is a great idea that just hasn't defined itself in a meaningful way to gaming communities.

I actually liked the general concept of Home, but it felt like walking around in a mall where all the shops sat vacant. Sure, there's a couple of kiosks which sell useless trinkets you really don't want, for insane amounts of real cash, but the feeling of having your wallet raped is dulled by the insanely slow load times.

Terrible UIs are endemic to all Japanese game companies (I love Capcom games, but the UIs haven't evolved since the NES). Part of it may be translation/cultural issues with how we read text, but I think a whole lot of it is plain old "not invented here" xenophobia. It's telling that even more than five years in, neither Sony nor Nintendo has made a significant effort to copy Live, even though it's clearly superior and has been since the beginning.

Home is a place I go to chill out in-between gaming sessions. Unlike most hardcore gamers, I'm not looking for more complexity in PlayStation Home; instead, I login for the serene simplicity. Sometimes you need to unplug from the kineticism of modern gaming and PlayStation Home allows you to do that while still offering mini-games and a top notch 3-D chat platform. It would be nice if they enabled audio and video streaming within personal spaces so that users could share movies and music with there friends, but there are major copyright issues to be hashed out before it can be implemented.

Home is a place I go to chill out in-between gaming sessions. Unlike most hardcore gamers, I'm not looking for more complexity in PlayStation Home; instead, I login for the serene simplicity. Sometimes you need to unplug from the kineticism of modern gaming and PlayStation Home allows you to do that while still offering mini-games and a top notch 3-D chat platform..

With my experiences in home, it's hard not to think that a comment like this isn't some sort of paid astroturfer. Home felt like I was wrangling a wild moose, trying to use it's third antler point to push a button to start playing a video in five minutes, after it buffers and decides to play me an EXTREEEME Axe Commercial. The games were silly and broken, usually, and The last thing I would ever want to have on top of that is GD fetch quests.

Home is a place I go to chill out in-between gaming sessions. Unlike most hardcore gamers, I'm not looking for more complexity in PlayStation Home; instead, I login for the serene simplicity. Sometimes you need to unplug from the kineticism of modern gaming and PlayStation Home allows you to do that while still offering mini-games and a top notch 3-D chat platform. It would be nice if they enabled audio and video streaming within personal spaces so that users could share movies and music with there friends, but there are major copyright issues to be hashed out before it can be implemented.

I heard some piece about Home and tried it. Going around was boring, every area needed an install - and corresponding wait - and wanted money for most of the games. I played a few free ones, saw it was a waste of time, and haven't been back since.

If I wanted to play classic games (the free ones in Home) I can fire up MAME. For little paid games, I can go to XBox Live or Steam. To waste time play free casual games I can go to Facebook.

Home is a place I go to chill out in-between gaming sessions. Unlike most hardcore gamers, I'm not looking for more complexity in PlayStation Home; instead, I login for the serene simplicity. Sometimes you need to unplug from the kineticism of modern gaming and PlayStation Home allows you to do that while still offering mini-games and a top notch 3-D chat platform. It would be nice if they enabled audio and video streaming within personal spaces so that users could share movies and music with there friends, but there are major copyright issues to be hashed out before it can be implemented.

I actually agree with this, to an extent. Many of my friends and I used Second Life the same way: when we weren't gaming we'd chill, chat, play minigames, or hang out at a club.

That's the big thing Home lacks at the moment. Without streaming media (contrary to popular beliefs, with music at least, it's not a big licensing issue, as streaming internet radio is pretty safe). One of the most popular aspects of Second Life is the clubs, they get like-minded people together, provide a social environment, and great background music.

Also, while I agree that most of Home _is_ pretty weak overall, there are a handful of gems. In particular is Sodium One, and that Star Control-like space game. Another really cool and innovative aspect was the global AR game Xi.

This change may be quite helpful, but it will only go so far unless they get music streaming up and running (or rather back, as it was working in closed beta at one point).

I logged into Home for the first time in months last night, and I was surprised by how much content is now there, and how populated it is.

I'm really glad that Sony is sticking with Home, and making money off of it. It's an interesting experiment, and in a world where social gaming is taking off, they could really do some great things with it.

If they could solve the load time problem somehow, I'd be more inclined to use Home. AFAICT, what it might sort of be good for is as an interface for browsing content (games, movies, music). As such, the theme park metaphor isn't necessarily a bad one - and the "check out this list of new releases" approach that's used by both PSN's and Live's store is suboptimal (for just browsing to see what's new). Simulating a real space to amble about in largely matches the "browsing" concept, so it might work. It's what I want to do on the occasions I log in to Home.

But what always kills it is the interminable wait for a new area to load.

The other thing they ought to add to Home is a physics engine. Why can't my avatar run, jump, climb, etc? Even without adding a whole lot of new content, the virtual world would be more interesting if I could do things there that I can't actually do in real life - climb buildings, jump over obstacles, explore the world. It's the reason people play video games in the first place, so it seems like it would be an obvious thing to make possible in Home.

As it stands, though, Home is little more than an advertising channel - and it's an advertising channel that constantly makes me wait to load up the advertisements. This is fairly uncompelling.

One of Homes biggest problem is the beta world is not the same as the current world. Also Home for Sony turns them a multimillion dollar profit for nothing.

For me Home screams of real-time GTA style streaming world immersion, but its not. You can't change the environment, you can't react against the environment. You cant jump, or walk into buildings without load times.

Sony should take a hint from Free Realms and make the world more open.

Home is a great platform its just another virtual way of expressing that fits the PS3 , But I do agree that its some what restricted at movements the character are stiff and interact solely on home field. Some feedback from the avatar would do nice but Home development only focus on improvement for profits.

I haven't loaded up Home in forever, maybe I will tonight out of sheer boredom. For me it boils down to one question, however: is there still enforced physical scarcity of virtual concepts? Yes? Then the service is utterly irrelevant.

Here's another user who doesn't mind the current experience in home. With a 50 meg link, load times are decent, and I like the casual games, especially pool.

My only gripe with it, as with real life, is that I suck at making friends, hence, I don't frequent the joint.

No fault of Sony here though.

I'd also agree with other commenters that the media playback interface on the PS3 really sucks, but I like that they are sticking with Upnp. I think with a decent interface, the protocol will not matter.

I am disappointed with Sony's Home team. What in the world happened to the Sony innovative spirit? How lame that they would copy an old, used, seen before and tired theme park model. How uninventive of them all. I always felt until now that Home was better than any theme park I've ever been to. Something has gone terribly wrong here. Disney fanboism is not so cool for this venue, as they have no clue what makes a good video game. You have lost a fan. So so sorry.

How about instead of catering to the limited group who uses Home (out of the 230m, like everyone I know, most of them inadvertently queued the download and got stuck making a single avatar and never used it again). how about actually fixing the default interface, and overhaul the media sharing system (add iTunes support, MCE, AirPlay, SOMETHING other than the useless thing that is DLNA for people with large collections. I'de love to actually access all that meta data instead of truncated file names and giant alphabetically sorted lists with no search function, GEZE! Would it be so hard to replicate Netflix nice UI for video and music search, and actually use a supported protocol from a major manufacturer?

Home is quaint, but the damned best (self acclkaimed) multimedia console SUCKS at multimedia? All these years we can't fix a GUI and license a newer protocol?

What you just said, PS Home, and the whole identity theft debacle is why I will likely never buy another Sony product again.

My main points were that people buy a PS3 to play the best video games on the market, not a "Second Life" clone. The major downward spiral was that the developers were constantly polling the Home community about ideas rather than making key decisions themselves. Why was this a problem? Because the only people participating in the polls were the 2% of people who enjoyed the Second Life clone known as Home. The other 98% of people with PS3s had experimented with Home, realized it had nothing to do with video games, and left immediately. Thus, they were never there to participate in the polls on the community forums to begin with. After all the flame wars, all I ever wanted to convey to the Home community and developers was that Home needs to be about video games or else it will fail.